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Johnson et al. have taken a radical step in relation to “radical uncertainty.” They have created a model for understanding the wide body of research demonstrating that individuals tend to overestimate their own rationality and decision-making capacities, including, according to the authors, academics, politicians and economists, who collectively tend to have overestimated human rationality. Their case is profound in arguing that the network of norms and institutions society gathers into a system of rules for identifying truth – what Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently termed a constitution of knowledge (Rauch, 2018) – is mistaken in relation to understanding how decisions are made.
Here we seek to extend the implications of Conviction Narrative Theory in relation to the role of imagination and its relationship with the social context. Johnson et al. argue that both factors are insufficiently incorporated into decision-making theory: We additionally propose that they are dynamically related to one another, and that it is the nature of this relationship that determines individuals' capacity to respond adaptively to new information. One defining difficulty with conviction narratives is that, notwithstanding evidence that challenges their position, individuals are often unable to adjust their narratives. One way of understanding this is irrationality; another way is through petrification of the narrative in the light of epistemic mistrust: New information that challenges the narrative is understood but not adopted into what Polanyi (1959/2014) calls “personal knowledge,” the sum total of what any individual knows, because it is not regarded as relevant (Fonagy, Luyten, & Allison, 2015)....